TFS Wednesday: Shop the Whole Store

My tip for this week is along the same theme of not limiting what you eat while you are losing weight or keeping it off. Hands down, the best thing to happen to losing weight is the nutrition label. Reading these is an eye opening experience, in both a good and bad way. If you start reading and comparing, you will see that the numbers on some “diet” foods are not as good as, or very close to “real” food. (And the real food almost always tastes better.)

My eyes were opened to this at my first Weight Watchers meeting when my leader explained that she wasn’t about to cook one meal for her family and different food for herself. She pointed out that a serving of Stouffer’s Lasagna (with meat) was only 7 points per cup (on the old point system). I was sold. I could easily spare 7 points for a filling, easy-to-prepare meal. I almost always have one of these in my freezer. It is my ultimate backup meal plan.

That led me to looking around at any and everything in the grocery store that caught my eye. I found that Bagel Bites were one point each (old system). Whipped cream cheese is only slightly higher than low fat cream cheese and it tastes soooo much better (in my opinion.) When I was completely tired of the diet frozen dinners, I branched out to checking the calories on the regular meals, I was amazed to see they were often only a point or two (or 100-150 calories) more. This opened up so many more options for me.

Now checking nutrition labels has gotten even easier with scanners on phones. It’s important to keep a close eye on portion size, but I now scan away all over the store. Some of the foods that I never would have thought of as “diet” but I buy regularly, because they are low in numbers and versatile, include: frozen hash browns, refrigerated buttermilk biscuits, frozen pizza dough, Alfredo sauce in a jar and dark chocolate syrup. On all of these the nutrition numbers will vary by brand, but in the case of Alfredo sauce and chocolate syrup, a little goes a long way on flavor.